Hearing aid chain opens in Braintree and Danvers

Zounds Hearing opened its first two Massachusetts stores last week at the South Shore Plaza in Braintree and the Liberty Tree Mall in Danvers.

Steve Adams

A hearing aid store has never developed into a brand-name national chain. Sam Thomasson thinks his startup can be the first.

Thomasson is the founder of Mesa, Ariz.’s Zounds Hearing, which opened its first two Massachusetts stores last week at the South Shore Plaza in Braintree and the Liberty Tree Mall in Danvers.

An electrical engineer, Thomasson previously founded Acoustic Technologies in Mesa, which makes noise canceling equipment for cell phone manufacturers. His young daughter’s struggle with profound hearing loss prompted him to study whether the technology could be used to build a better hearing aid.

“I was frustrated by the fact that I couldn’t talk to her in a restaurant, and I couldn’t talk to her in a car,” Thomasson said.

Excessive background noise is a common complaint of hearing aid wearers, and deters many others from buying a device.

With backing from Signature Capital of Portland, Maine, Thomasson founded Zounds in 2006 and opened its first retail store in early 2007. The venture capital firm’s founder, William Turner, backed the concept partly because he had bought a hearing aid and was disappointed in its performance, Thomasson said.

The Braintree and Danvers stores will bring Zounds’ national expansion to 20 stores, with another 10 opening by early November. Zounds has hired John Costello, Home Depot’s former top marketing and merchandising officer, as CEO to oversee the company’s growth plan.

For a business model, Thomasson looks to LensCrafters, which showed how an eyeglass shop could grow from a handful of stores into a national chain before being acquired by Luxottica for $1.4 billion in 1995.

Almost all Zounds’ stores are located in regional shopping malls, in a strategy to expose its products to family members of the hearing-impaired who may influence a purchase.

Zounds locations have a bright, high-tech look resembling a cell phone store. In the store’s lobby, customers can sit at a table and watch a video contrasting Zounds’ performance to a competitor’s in blocking out background noise as an on-screen waiter reads a list of specials.

“People with hearing impairment almost never order the specials,” Thomasson said. “They order off the menu.”

The company holds 55 patents for noise-cancellation technology used to develop its three models of hearing aids. They succeed in filtering out 90 percent of unwanted noise, Thomasson said, and eliminate the feedback squeal that is an annoyance on many hearing aids.

Each of the three models sells for $1,449 – about half the cost of some competitors’ models – and run on rechargeable batteries.

Thomasson said the company limits costs with mass manufacturing techniques as opposed to competitors’ hand-assembled models. Wearers can set them to different modes such as quiet, party, dining and theater to adjust to various sound environments.

“People can now go into a restaurant or a loud social setting and can enjoy their life,” Thomasson said. “Other people with hearing aids are just so frustrated with that. Ninety-five percent of them hate them in any kind of social situation.”